The Week Ahead: Immigration and fiscal reform headline ambitious agenda before August recess

Welcome to Texas on the Potomac’s “The Week Ahead,” a preview of events to come on Capitol Hill and at the White House this week. This week’s report was written by William K. Moore of ViaNovo.

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Since January, Washington has anticipated an August confrontation over the debt limit that would result in default or a tax reform-entitlement spending deal. The conflict still looms, but the calendar is rapidly slipping away, endangering the tax reform part of the bargain.

By Billy Moore

Congress returns Monday for thirty legislative days of summer leading to the five-week August recess. The Senate begins with bipartisan legislative priorities as the House sets the table for a partisan fiscal agenda.

Congress is setting out to prove it can pass substantial legislation. The Senate plans to complete action on a farm bill this week and the House intends to act on companion legislation later in June. Provided compromise can reached on substantial differences over nutrition funding – the old food stamps program – a bill will be enacted this summer or fall. Later this week, the Senate will debate bipartisan comprehensive immigration reform. If the Senate can generate an overwhelming sixty to seventy votes for the bill, Republican senators will tell House leaders to take it or leave it, and Majority Leader Eric Cantor might carry the bipartisan bill to the floor and final passage.

At the same time, Congress will demonstrate again its dysfunction. The House plans to pass a handful of appropriations bills, beginning with the military construction-veterans and homeland security spending bills this week.

As a result of a failure to conference a budget agreement, there is a $92 billion difference between the House and Senate appropriations allocations. The most likely result is that the spending bills debated by the House this month will be wasted effort. Without an overall spending agreement, the appropriations process starts at a dead end, resulting in a continuing resolution late this year that will keep government funded for months into fiscal 2014. To compound that failure, another sequester will cut 9.8 percent from defense spending and 7.3 percent from domestic programs in October. Only an unlikely fall fiscal bargain would save the fiscal 2014 spending process from abandon.

Even as Washington demonstrates function and dysfunction, the economy is showing resilience with rising housing and stock markets and consumer confidence at a five-year high.